Mark Chadbourn - Sinister happenings in The Dark Age

Anyone with an interest in Celtic mythology should pick up a Mark Chadbourn novel. Blending ancient symbols with contemporary themes, Chadbourn's latest novel, The Queen of Sinister, takes you on a breathless, whistle-stop tour of some of the most intriguing Celtic settings and characters around.

The Queen of Sinister is set in Britain's new Dark Age, where magic has returned to the world and modern technology has become useless. A new order of good and evil has taken hold of the country - thugs rule the urban landscapes, terrible creatures terrorise the villages with their blood-lust. And now humanity has another enemy: a plague is spreading across the country and once contracted, death swiftly follows. Dr Caitlin Shepherd learns that the cure for the plague lies beyond the veil, in the mystical Celtic Otherworld. Driven by grief and pursued by the fearsome Lament Brood, she enters the world of dreams and nightmare to petition the Gods to help save humanity. But there are other things in motion that she doesn't know about yet, and any one of them could bring about her death.

From the outset, The Queen of Sinister flies along at a rapid pace with no long descriptions to endure and no obvious info-dumps. Words have been selected carefully to produce their vivid images but how does Chadbourn achieve this sleekness of phrase? "It's a combination of several factors," he said. "Certainly, I'm a very harsh self-editor. I took a whole chapter out of the start of the book on the second draft and chopped out massive chunks in other places because I thought it was dragging.

"Even if you feel it's the best writing you've done, you have to be brutal if it's not serving the story," he continued. "I think that harks back to my days as a journalist where you're always taught not to waste words. Journalism is about precision and an understanding of character - because that job is about much more than just writing; it's about getting into the heads of people and finding out what they really think as opposed to what they say. Journalistic training helps you to edit yourself, and to use as few words as possible to get where you're trying to go.

"Then there's my film and TV writing work. That gives me the ability to think visually and shape stories efficiently. Film and TV programmes never ramble and are rarely padded, unlike many books. Again, you have to be very precise in your use of words because there is so little time available - every second is valuable and needs to work towards telling the story or defining the character. When I approach a novel, it plays out in my mind like a movie and I attempt to break it down into acts and scenes to get a structure that works. When the first draft is done, the brutalist, hard-nosed journalist comes to the fore and I hack out anything that's wool-gathering or irrelevant. Authors love their worlds so much they'd happily tell you every aspect of them, but that will, sooner or later, make for a dull experience for the reader.

"And a lot has to do with passion for what I'm doing. I immerse myself fully in my story - I'm there with the characters, in the thick of battle or trying to uncover a mystery. When you reach that state, you delve into the deepest parts of your subconscious and ideas come hard and fast. Some of them are so left-field you'd never have found them otherwise, and you really don't want to lose them so you try to get them on-screen as quickly as you can. That tends to keep the story throbbing along."

There's a significantly higher body count in this latest story. Some authors find it therapeutic to fictionally wipe out a large percentage of the human race but Chadbourn sees things a little more seriously. "It's not that therapeutic when the real thing is playing out on your TV screens in Madrid or Iraq or Israel and Palestine," he said. "The aim of wiping almost everyone out in The Queen of Sinister was to set society back to year zero so it could be built up again. The really therapeutic part came from destroying all the things I think are wrong with our society, from the structures of Government to multi-national corporations. It allowed me to comment on those things by considering if the world would be better without them, even in the midst of all the hardship and suffering.

"I think I've banged on about this before, but we live in a world of duality where everything is defined by its opposite - we only understand the dark by knowing what the light is like, we only know inhumanity and evil because we see and understand true, unqualified love for a fellow human being. I think my books have an inherently positive message, but to get that across I have to show the worst of what existence has to offer or else that message is meaningless. So, in The Queen of Sinister, human life is failing all over the place and by that we can actually see how valuable life is."

This duality carries into all aspects of Chadbourn's writing, including his decision to set The Queen of Sinister in the Otherworld – his first novel to spend so much time there. "It's partly because it's symbolic of the lead character's mind as she retreats into various fantasies to escape the misery of her own life, but also because, in the book, our own world is falling into darkness and suffering and I wanted a numinous place of wonder as a counterpoint. I was stimulated by the fact that we hadn't seen it in any detail before in any of my other books and I wanted to show the reader what it was like. This Otherworld has an incredibly rich background of races, cities, history, culture, beliefs, which I know intricately. And as a reader and lover of fantasy, a place of wonder and mystery is the sunny uplands to which we're all continually moving."

Chadbourn's Brothers and Sisters of Dragons move towards these sunny uplands endowed with magical powers, but this new series is seeing some changes. The original Age of Misrule series followed the adventures of a group of these Brothers and Sisters but The Dark Ages mixes in a far greater ratio of 'normal' people. "There were two Brothers and Sisters of Dragons in The Devil in Green, one in The Queen of Sinister and two in the forthcoming book, The Hounds of Avalon," said Chadbourn. "And all of them come together to make the mystical 'five', the number where power lies.

"Rather than start with the whole group fully formed for The Dark Ages, I wanted to examine how people became heroic by rising above the limitations of their normal life. Each of the Brothers and Sisters is on a journey, which we follow closely against the larger background of an evil approaching from the edge of the universe to wipe out the human race. By using more regular people in each book, it allowed me a greater focus in character terms and I could more clearly delineate what makes the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons special."

This focus on character is obvious in The Queen of Sinister. Each person goes through five shades of hell and high water before the end of the book, and those who survive are changed by it. "In its purest form, 'story' is all about change," said Chadbourn. "If characters aren't changed by the events they experience, those events are pointless - unless the lack of change is an important character point in itself, of course.

"We are all changed by the things we go through in our lives, whether its the mundane fact of starting a new job with new people, or the big things like the death of a loved one, or the birth of a child. Once you've passed through that experience you're not the person you were before and can never go back to being that person. If characters are not altered in a story, the book is not being 'true' in any real sense and, personally, I think it's just bad writing."

On his own writing front, Chadbourn continues to be busy: "I'm working on several projects, as usual," he said. "You put out ideas all the time, but they all tend to come back at once in a nervous breakdown-inducing deadline crisis rather than at a nice leisurely pace. I have a science fiction series in development with the BBC, and I'm fleshing out a horror movie project with a big name producer and a soundtrack by a famous rock band, but contractually I can't talk about either project. Besides, in the nightmarish world of TV and film with its numerous obstacles neither may make it to the screen and I don't want to jinx them.

"I'm also writing The Hounds of Avalon, which is the final book in The Dark Age sequence, and which should be out March 2005. The remnants of the Government has relocated to Oxford after the destruction of London, and it's attempting to fight back against the Celtic gods that have returned to our world. But at the same time a terrifying Evil force has decided humanity's time is done and is in the process of eradicating our vile infestation of the world..."


Copyright © Sandy Auden, 2004


Sandy is currently working as an enthusiastic reviewer for SFX magazine; a tireless news hound for Starburst magazine; a diligent interviewer / reviewer for The Third Alternative magazine and a combination of all the above for The Alien Online. She spends her spare time lying down with a cold flannel on her forehead.